Iconic songbird Sarojini Naidu who called Gandhi a chocolate-coloured Mickey Mouse

Childhood is a time when your home is your world. In my case my home, Anand Bhavan in Allahabad, reflected a wider world in which my parents and thousands of men and women like them were fighting for freedom from British rule. The young and old who came to Anand Bhavan had pledged their lives to a cause that left them little time for the luxury of private life. Many, known and unknown, among them, spent months and years in jail. Yet the memory I have of growing up during those years is of the unquenchable optimism and energy that surrounded me, and the laughter that made light of what in reality was a long, hard, and often heart-breaking struggle.

Sarojini Naidu was a frequent visitor to our home, and we looked upon her as a much-loved member of our family. She had been a friend of my grandfather, Motilal Nehru, and her daughter, Padmaja, whom my sisters and I called Padmaja masi, was my mother's closest friend. So Mrs Naidu became Bari (elder) masi to us. She had been president of the Indian National Congress, imprisoned twice and later would be jailed a third time in 1942 for nearly two years. She was a celebrated poet and admired for her stirring eloquence on the public platform. Most stirring had been her active role in the salt satyagraha. After Gandhi's Salt March to Dandi in 1930 to protest against the British tax on salt, she and Maulana Azad had led the raid on the Dharasana salt depot. It meant facing the clubs and steel-tipped lathis assembled to crush the marchers. Few episodes in the non-violent struggle for freedom had been met with such horrifying violence. All this we knew, yet what we knew best was the fun and festivity that filled the house when Bari masi came into it.

She was a gifted mimic with stories to tell about people she had met on her travels, who were as unlike as a dhoti-clad traveller met on a train and movie idol John Barrymore, met at Bombay's Taj Mahal Hotel, and she had a way of accompanying her anecdotes with gestures that had us in fits of laughter. A devoted and totally irreverent disciple of Gandhi, she called him a chocolate-coloured Mickey Mouse and had no truck with his call to his followers to dress in coarse khadi, "the livery of freedom", choosing to dress in vivid south Indian silks. She would look us children up and down and say to our mother, "Good gracious! How did a lovely woman like you produce these odd-looking children?"

I was 12 years old when she asked me, "Would you rather be the most brilliant woman in the world or the most beautiful?"

"The most beautiful," I breathed ecstatically. She threw up her hands in despair, declaring I was a typical woman who didn't care a fig for brains and saying she hoped I would have more sense later on. I cherish a book she gave me in which she wrote, in a lyrical reference to my name: "As a star illumines the sky, so may you shed radiance on earth."

She was Uttar Pradesh governor when Gandhi was murdered, stern and stoic in her grief, and unable to bear the weeping around her. Characteristically, she turned on a loud mourner and commanded him to "stop snivelling". "Would you rather that he had died old and decrepit in his bed? This was the only death great enough for him." What she meant was Gandhi's assassination would only strengthen his belief in the brotherhood of all Indians. His lifelong commitment to the sanctity of all religions would live on and become the strong secular foundation of our young republic.

(The author, daughter of Vijayalakshmi Pandit, is among the first Indian writers of note in English)